The piercing alarms rang out across nearly every floor almost instantly, and beneath the enormous shadow cast by Black Stone Station, the entire city plunged into chaos--
Everyone could now look up and see an astonishing space megastructure covering the sky. From the ground, Black Stone Station's enormous disk-shaped hull looked like an inverted landmass of steel, while countless attached structures, weapons batteries of all sizes, augmentation devices, and Shield Generators loomed jagged and terrifying within the shadow.
At the same time Black Stone Station appeared, an invisible force dispersed the surrounding clouds and tore open vast stretches of space. Starlight from the distant universe spread across the sky like a shattered mirror, and the phenomenon was still expanding.
The crowds on the surface began fleeing in all directions in terror. Traffic on the city streets instantly fell into chaos, alarms rang throughout the entire region, and fear, uncertainty, and the collective mental shock brought on by exposure to the external starlight began spreading through Boundary City like a plague.
The Crossroads, Depth L-1.
Vast swaths of pale violet mist rose along the city's outskirts. Within the mist, something seemed to be collapsing apart and falling from the sky. Illusions of uncertain reality first rose from the "suburbs" outside Boundary City, then gradually devoured the urban districts from the outside in. The illusions were filled with unsettling silhouettes--dragons, giants, beasts wreathed in lightning, and kings wearing crowns.
The Crossroads, Depth L-2.
Jagged, twisted Obsidian Pillars began growing from all over the city, as though the earth had turned upside down and the bones buried in the old world had heard the horns of the city-states and mistakenly believed they still belonged to this age.
The Crossroads, Depth L-3.
But just then, a strange, low rumble suddenly spread throughout The Crossroads.